Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

NOTE TO J. V. STALIN, L. B. KAMENEV AND L. D. TROTSKY

Dictated:Dictated by phone on April 18, 1922Published:First published in 1959 inLenin Miscellany XXXVI.

      Printed from secretarial notes.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1976,

      Moscow,Volume 45,

      pages530c-531a.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet ArchiveYou may freely copy, distribute,
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Comrades Stalin, Kamenev and Trotsky

Litvinov’stelegram on the signing of the agreement  with
Germany[1]raises the question of whether it is appropriate topublish this right away or to postpone it until there is
more clarity on whether or not a break at Genoa is
inevitable.[2]I believe this question should be settled this very
day.

[1]Areference to the treaty concluded by Soviet Russia with
Germany on April 16, 1922, at Rapallo, near Genoa, during
the Genoa Conference.

Leningave an assessment of the Rapallo Treaty in his “Draft
Decision of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee on the
Report of the Delegation to the Genoa Conference” (see present
edition, Vol. 33, pp. 356–57).

TheAll-Russia C.E.C., in a decision on the delegation’s report
adopted on May 17, 1922, recognised “only this type of treaty
as being normal for the R.S.F.S.R.’s relations with capitalist
states” (III sessia Vserossiiskogo Tsentralnogo Ispolnitelnogo
Komiteta IX sozyva. Bulleten No. 5, 19 maia 1922 goda, p. 17).
The report on the signing of the Rapallo Treaty was published
inIzvestia VTsIKNo. 85 of April 19.

[2]Areference to the situation which had taken shape at the Genoa
Conference.

OnApril 11, 1922, the Soviet delegation was handed the
“experts’ report” worked out at a conference of experts from Great
Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Japan in London in March
(London Memorandum). It contained demands that the Soviet
Government should pay all the debts of the tsarist and
Provisional governments and all the authorities which had existed in
Russia, return to foreigners their former property which had been
nationalised by the Soviet state, or compensate them for the
damage inflicted on their property, or for the loss of it, and
establish economic and legal privileges for foreigners, and a number
of other demands which in fact meant abolition of the foreign
trade monopoly.

Theofficial reply of the Soviet delegation to the “experts’
report” was set out in its memorandum of April 20. The Soviet
delegation firmly rejected these demands, qualifying them as
an attempt to “introduce in Russia a system of capitulations
encroaching on her sovereignty” (Dokumenty vneshnei politiki
SSSR, Vol. V, Moscow, 1961, p. 235), and put forward
counter-claims for compensation of the losses inflicted on Russia by the
foreign intervention, stressing that the R.S.F.S.R. Government
was prepared to negotiate on compensation of the losses of
foreign citizens only on the basis of reciprocity.